May 15, 2014

Bookshelf

By SAM ROBERTS

Captain Kidd helped build it. The organist and the organ builder once came to blows. It granted the land for what became Columbia University. Robert Fulton is buried there. Its yearly rent to the British crown was one peppercorn. “It” is Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, now celebrated in “Trinity: Near and Far, Now and Then” (Trinity Wall Street).

This richly illustrated coffee-table book explores Trinity Wall Street and nearby St. Paul’s Chapel from their earliest incarnations in the 1600s through their impact on downtown urban development and on far-flung spiritual advancement today.

“Perhaps no parish in the Anglican Communion is a more vivid example of the contrasts between the hectic pace of this world and the holy promise of the next than Trinity Wall Street, which stands still on eminent ground, devoted all these centuries distant to the work of the risen Lord,” the journalist Jon Meacham writes in the introduction.

“Trinity is a critical element, a telling tableau: a temple of the Christian God set in the midst of Wall Street, a holy place in the world of money and appetite,” Mr. Meacham continues. “That the parish stands so close to the Stock Exchange, Federal Hall and ground zero gives us a tactile manifestation of the competing claims the world puts on humanity: the pull of religion, of commerce, of politics and of terror.”

Mr. Crawford, who with his wife, Susan, illustrated hundreds of species identifications at the American Museum of Natural History, describes Whitman’s iconic poetry collection “Leaves of Grass” as a “kind of sacred American text,” and he writes, “It seems fitting that his work should be transcribed by hand, the way that monks illuminated Holy Scripture in the Middle Ages.”

When Felix G. Rohatyn retired in 1992 as chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the state agency created in 1975 to borrow on the city’s behalf, he pronounced himself still a dreamer. But after nearly two decades of playing the role of fiscal Cassandra, he acknowledged it was time for a successor who still had illusions.

Armed with an agenda punctuated by reducing pedestrians’ deaths to none and adding 200,000 affordable apartments, Bill de Blasio does not have the problem of insufficient wishful thinking. Nor, after less than five months as mayor, should he.

Still, the mayor might be tempted to peruse “Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920” (Harvard University Press), which focuses on a post-Gilded Age era when, David Huyssen writes, the city had begun “to replace the frontier as the apotheosis of the classless myth in America.”

Mr. Huyssen, a historian at Yale, argues engagingly that despite three decades of hopeful reform activism and regulatory innovation, “inequality between rich and poor became more, not less acute, all the way up to the stock market crash of 1929.” Was the widening gap causal or correlative?

“If the old Progressive Era did not actually redress inequality at the beginning of the 20th century,” he writes, “what is missing from our understanding of its history that makes anyone think a new Progressive Era would do the trick at the start of the 21st?”